Something's Got to Give

Published: March 24, 1996

(Page 2 of 10)

Just as the holiday traffic reaches its peak, Tom Zaccheo looks down the bank of radar scopes to see who's closest to flaming out and spots Joe Jorge, the breathless trainee, falling dangerously behind in his commands. "Hey rookie, what's wrong down at the end there, rookie!" Zaccheo jeers mercilessly. Jorge looks over and, emulating the veterans, gives a gruff, fearless chuckle. But he turns right back to his scope -- "Jetlink 3723 turn left heading 080 -- traffic off your 2 o'clock!" He doesn't have a second to spare.

ALMOST 15 YEARS HAVE PASSED since the infamous Patco strike, which ended with President Reagan firing 11,400 of the nation's 17,000 controllers, but the F.A.A.'s system for moving airplanes safely across the skies has never been closer to chaos. Many of the nation's airport control towers and radar rooms still have fewer fully trained controllers than before the strike, yet the number of flights they must guide through the teeming skies has soared in some facilities by 200 percent. Meanwhile the computer and radar equipment they must do it with has grown scandalously old and degraded. Last year, air traffic control centers -- some with 30-year-old, vacuum-tubed computers -- suffered more blank radar scopes, dead radios and failed power systems than in any previous year, according to Representative John J. Duncan Jr. of Tennessee, chairman of the House aviation subcommittee.

F.A.A. officials say they are turning things around -- hiring more controllers and replacing old equipment. In 1994, the agency embarked on a modernization program that they say will deliver 1,000 new screens and work stations to the busiest controllers beginning in 1998. Meanwhile, because of built-in redundancies, the current system is "99.4 percent reliable," says Anthony Willett, an F.A.A. spokesman. "It's a '65 Mustang that we're hellbent on keeping in great shape, polishing the hell out of the fenders." Adds Monte R. Belger, associate administrator for air traffic services, "the Mustang is going down the road at 55 miles an hour, so any improvements have to be done while it's up and running."

Equipment failures have not yet led to any crashes, but in the airspace over New York City, the number of operational errors -- also known as near midair collisions -- jumped threefold in 1994. And as the F.A.A. lags further behind schedule and over cost in modernizing the equipment ($500 million and 15 years wasted on software that was never used), it falls to the controllers, handling half a billion passengers per year and working mind-numbing overtime, to keep the system from completely falling apart. "I won't tell you what the 'F' in F.A.A. stands for," snarls one controller. "But the 'A.A.' is for again and again."

Mention air traffic control and most people think of those glass-enclosed airport towers, but the real frenzy takes place in the F.A.A.'s 175 Terminal Radar Approach Controls, or Tracons, some of them miles from the nearest runway. Once a plane takes off, an airport controller "hands it off" by computer to a controller at a Tracon, who uses radar and radio to guide the plane through the swarming metropolitan airspace. Once the plane has climbed to 17,000 feet, the Tracon controller hands it off again to a controller at 1 of 21 Air Route Traffic Control Centers, which guide flights across the high-altitude expanses between airports. All F.A.A. facilities are challenging places to work, but the New York Tracon -- which handles up to 7,000 flights a day into and out of Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark, as well as 47 smaller airports, all within a 150-mile radius -- is considered the most hair-raising control room in the world.

Monitored by 24-hour-a-day guards, surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, the New York Tracon is a white, aluminum-sided, two-story compound with a jumble of radio antennas and satellite dishes on a nearby tower. Upstairs, in the vast, windowless operations room, it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the dark. But soon the outlines of some 40 controllers begin to emerge, sitting at banks of luminous radar scopes, while in the center of the room traffic managers scurry about on a lighted platform, monitoring the flow of airplanes into the New York region, coordinating runway configurations at the three major airports so that flight paths don't conflict and calculating how to work the maximum number of aircraft without bringing any one controller to his knees.

Although the La Guardia and Kennedy controllers work the more famous airports, it's the Newark controllers (47 of them, predominantly male and deployed in shifts of 12) who handle the most volume, work the most complex airspace, clock the most overtime and live under the greatest threat of going down the pipes -- a situation all controllers may soon face if the system doesn't improve. In the Tracon's other sectors, the controllers look inert, hunched toward their scopes and muttering quietly into their headsets. Meanwhile, the Newark controllers -- perhaps in anticipatory dread -- are screaming at their pilots, yelling to their supervisors, denouncing the F.A.A., placing wagers in the sector's football pool, sumo-wrestling behind the scopes and, in the case of one controller, gliding around the operations room on Rollerblades. "Every hour around here," says one Newark controller, "is 59 minutes of boredom and 1 of sheer terror."